Richard D North

Searle is 90 tomorrow and Channel 4 News ran a tribute interview. Typically, the commentary had to have a little attitudinising. More »

Note: If this were a review, it could have been much shorter and just said: “Buy this book. It’s lovely, sharp and beguiling”. I wanted to write something which drew on the experiences Andrew Brown and I shared, not least but not only at the Independent in the late 1980s. I also wanted to touch on the whole business of memoir- and nature-writing. More »

Here we go again. We are headed for an epoch-making election with an opposition leader who has a horror of authenticity. We don’t need atavastic politics, but it is a big danger that we have political stars whose charisma depends on being bland and controlling. Mr Cameron could do far better. More »

Is this the best eating in Paris? Quite possibly. Here’s my case for L’Auberge Bressane, and the neighbourhood food shops, in the “toney” 7th arrondissement. It’s all a demonstration of the homage affluence pays to authenticity.  More »

Most of the books on global warming science and policy are pretty muddled, hysterical or dreamy by turns. Very few have real quality. Mike Hulme’s book, Why We Disagree About Climate Change seems to be in a different class. More »

It is just possible that Philip Blond and the Red Toryism of his ResPublica are the very fig-leaf a true-blue Conservative Party needs. It may be that David Cameron, beyond his bland rebranding of the Tories, is thinking along these lines…. More »

Oliver James has written some silly and poorly-argued books and it would have been nice if Contented Dementia, his new offering, was an exception. It isn’t. More »

The late Dominick Dunne, novelist and chronicler of celebrity trials, was by parts Taki, Jennifer’s Diary, The Sunday Times Insight team, Edith Wharton, Thackeray, and J J Hunsecker (of The Sweet Smell of Success). More »

Previously, I listed Karen Blixen’s house outside Copenhagenand Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge as my favourite interiors. Casting around for third, I wondered about including Charleston, the rustic Bloomsbury hangout. Now I have a better candidate: Matisse’s chapel at Saint Paul de Vence. More »

Betty Miller and Henry James both wrote beautifully about the merits of failure. Here are a couple of quotes from a mid-summer mini-orgy of reading. More »